Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  “We’ll just check the office one last time, and then I’ll see you off,” he said.

  The streets leading into Republic Square were closed off and we’d had to park blocks away from the apartment. As we made our way there on foot, we found ourselves in a crowd of onlookers, all watching as the entire square was being dug up. Workers using excavating equipment were being aided by dozens and dozens of ordinary people wielding pickaxes and shovels. They’d break through the frozen ground using the heavy machinery and scoop out as much earth as they could, then people would get inside the hole and continue the work by hand. Several holes were being dug out at once and as we drew nearer, we saw the people in one hole signaling that the work in all the others should stop. A hush descended upon the crowd as all the equipment was turned off. People rushed over to the suspicious hole and put their ears to the ground, encouraging others to do the same. I counted some thirty people listening before the strange ritual ended and the machines started up again as people returned to digging in their own holes.

  “What in the world is going on?” Gray exclaimed. “Have they all gone bonkers?”

  “They’re looking for a secret underground ÁVH prison.”

  A young couple wheeling a baby carriage had come up behind us. Ilona and Villi were both schoolteachers and clearly relished the opportunity to practice their English on native speakers. After we’d introduced ourselves, I asked Ilona how she could tell we weren’t Hungarians.

  “Your coat is very beautiful.” She cast an appreciative eye over the navy wool velour swagger coat with a beaver collar I’d bought myself in London the previous winter. Ilona herself was wearing a threadbare man’s overcoat far too large for her slender frame—her husband’s overcoat, I guessed, seeing as how Villi wore only a trench coat. With the collar turned up and the brim of his hat pulled low, a cigarette dangling rakishly from his lips, he looked like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, minus the uncompromising set of actor’s jaw.

  The outward resemblance to Bogey was quite deliberate, we learned. Our new acquaintances belonged to a clandestine film society that screened banned Western movies. They’d named their small daughter Erzsébet after Elizabeth Taylor, Ilona confided; National Velvet was her favorite picture.

  I peeked in at the baby, bundled up in a snowsuit beneath a pink crocheted blanket. “Hello, Erzsébet,” I whispered. She turned her head and regarded me with serious interest, her small round face a study in concentration.

  “Her first American,” said Villi, smiling fondly at his wife. The love in his soft brown eyes, the hopefulness in his voice as he imagined a future in which his daughter would grow up to meet more Americans, made me ashamed. Villi and Ilona assumed we’d come to share their country’s jubilation at having thrown off the Soviet yoke, and here we were, me in my expensive coat, gawking like tourists at the frenzied activity on the square while making plans to get out of Hungary as soon as possible. I wanted to urge the couple to leave too; America would do nothing to save them and little Erzsébet, I wanted to tell them. Speaking English was a liability. Watching banned films could get them in trouble. Naturally, I said none of these things.

  Gray was quizzing Villi about the hole-digging operation in the square. “Is it true, that the regime hid their prisons underground?”

  Villi made a dismissive gesture in the direction of the people in the square. “They think so,” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think Hungarians are delirious with freedom.”

  “Delirious with freedom,” my brother repeated, savoring the words. He collected phrases the way others collected souvenirs on their travels. “Rather like a person in the grip of a fever?”

  “With fever comes a great thirst,” replied Villi darkly. He proceeded to describe the events he’d witnessed earlier in the week, the horrifying prelude to the digging in the square. A short distance from where we were standing was Communist Party headquarters, he told us. Dozens of ÁVH officers had barricaded themselves inside. They’d taken prisoners and had threatened to shoot the hostages, the standoff persisting for several days. Finally, a delegation was allowed inside to negotiate. Some of them brought arms, apparently, and shooting was heard from within. Tanks arrived—nobody was sure who sent them—and began bombarding the building, forcing the officers to surrender. As soon as they did, crowds stormed the place and dragged the ÁVH men out. The mob lynched them; he’d seen it with his own eyes. People tearing at the bodies, kicking, spitting on the desecrated corpses—

  He stopped. Ilona was glowering at him. “Miért mondod el nekik mindezt?” she hissed.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “My wife says I shouldn’t be telling you about this. You will think we Hungarians are barbarians.”

  “I’ve seen it elsewhere,” said Jakub. A haunted look had come into his eyes. “In France, they killed collaborators after the war.”

  “Oh, my darling.” I pulled my coat’s beaver collar more closely around my neck. Here was something else I hadn’t known, that he’d witnessed scenes of vengeance like the ones Villi was describing. Every day we spent in Hungary brought new revelations, complicating my understanding of my husband. How, after seeing the absolute worst in people, and after losing his family, had he himself not succumbed to anger or despair? I listened to him tell the others about the violence unleashed against anyone accused of consorting with the enemy. Summary executions, shaving the heads of women who’d slept with German soldiers. I hadn’t known any of it, and there we were, living among people in Paris who had surely witnessed all of these things, if they hadn’t participated in them.

  “The term they used was épuration,” he said. “Purification. Nobody knows for sure how many Frenchmen died at the hands of other Frenchmen following the liberation, but I’ve heard it numbered in the thousands.”

  “Thousands!” We were all shocked, even József and the Hungarian couple. Knowing of the brutality and oppression under Rákosi these past seven years, “purification” might be tempting here too.

  “When did it stop?” asked my brother.

  “De Gaulle put an end to it eventually.”

  “I wish someone would put an end to this,” said Villi, returning his attention to the diggers.

  Nothing had changed in the apartment since our visit the previous day. Nobody had removed the bloodstained coverlet or swept the floor. The windows remained shattered, no effort made to cover the gaping panes with cardboard. Zoltán’s typewriter sat on the middle of his desk, the unfinished poem still trapped between the rollers.

  “What does this say exactly?” My brother had gone over to peer at the page.

  József parsed the words. “The literal translation of the lines would be ‘and the frost bound the tears between those orbs, and held them there.’”

  “Orbs? Don’t you mean eyeballs? He’s talking about tears.”

  “It is rather archaic, but your brother used the word gömb. Perhaps he needed it for the rhyme? Szemgolyó is the contemporary term for eyeball.”

  “Curious,” said Gray, glancing over the typewritten lines. “Was he in the habit of numbering his poems?”

  József shook his head. “I’ve never known him to use Roman numerals.” Gingerly, he unrolled the sheet of paper from the cylinder and pulled it out, taking care not to touch the bloody fingerprint on the upper edge. “Thirty-two, followed by the Arabic numbers forty-five and forty-six, separated by a hyphen … It sounds like a chapter in a book, doesn’t it, followed by the page numbers perhaps?”

  “He left us a clue!” I crowed, grabbing Jakub’s hand in excitement. “It’s the same thing you did in the war, passing messages in books.”

  One day, while strolling along the Seine, the two of us had stopped to browse at the stall of one of the booksellers—the bouquinistes, as they were called. Idly, my husband had picked up a novella by Prosper Merimée.

  “Vou
s ne disposez pas de son autre, avez-vous?” he said to the bookseller.

  “Lequel, monsieur?” the man responded with a distracted air.

  “Columba.”

  This got his attention. The bookseller scrutinized Jakub. Then his face broke into a smile. “Mon Dieu, combien d’années a-t-il été? Je ne vous reconnaît pas sans la soutane!”

  I’d known that my husband had gone about disguised as a seminary student during his time in the Resistance, but I hadn’t realized that he’d frequented the bouquinistes in religious garb, or that the works of a less-than-first-rate nineteenth-century author and playwright were the preferred vehicle for clandestine communications within his cell. He and this fellow had evidently been in cahoots, and the bouquiniste was so overjoyed to see Jakub again, once he recognized him without his cassock, that he closed the stall and took us off to a café, where he ordered a bottle of pink champagne.

  Now Jakub and I watched as Gray crunched his way across the broken glass on the floor to the bookshelves, where he began reading the spines of the leather-bound volumes. I was expecting him to ask for help—there were an awful lot of books to go through—but József seemed to know exactly what our brother was looking for and directed him to the proper spot.

  “Second shelf. You’ll find all three volumes of the Babits translation, side by side.”

  Gray selected the first of the identically bound books and brought it over to the desk. “Canto thirty-two of the Inferno, lines forty-five through forty-six,” he prompted as József leafed through the pages.

  “Dante,” murmured my husband. “I should have guessed.”

  “Well, well, well. Your brother did leave us a message after all,” said József. Tucked inside the book was a small sheaf of pages that looked as if they had been torn from a stenographer’s pad, each page bearing a series of handwritten entries in black ink.

  “What have you got there?” asked Gray, craning his neck to see over his shoulder.

  “Surveillance reports.” József frowned as he skimmed through them. “They’re from before your brother was arrested.” He showed us where each was dated—they were all from a two-week period in the summer of 1951—and proceeded to summarize their contents.

  Zoltán (Z) was observed meeting with another party (P) in Vörösmarty tér. The two adjourned to a coffeehouse, where they encountered a third party (T), who had arrived a good deal earlier to secure a table in the back. Five days later, they met again at the Oktogon and entered the metro, surfacing farther down Andrássy út. P parted company from the others at this point, and the watcher followed T and our brother as far as Saint Stephens Basilica, where they shook hands and separated. The very next evening, the three of them were together again in Zoltán’s house, where they were overheard discussing the fate of a fourth man, Kálmán. T suspected he’d been apprehended by the secret police and warned the others that it would be unwise to meet again. While the notes on the previous encounters were brief, the account of this conversation was fairly detailed, filling up both sides of several pieces of notebook paper.

  “It looks to me like the children’s home was bugged,” said Gray.

  “No bug, is very clean,” I quipped. But I honestly didn’t think there was a bug. It seemed more plausible that one of the parties, P or T, was an informer.

  József agreed with my assessment, pointing out that the notes on the conversation were incomplete. “This isn’t a verbatim transcript of everything they discussed, it reads more like personal recollections after the fact.”

  “In other words,” said Jakub, his thoughts moving in tandem with my own, “Zoltán was betrayed by someone he trusted, someone he’d invited into his own living room.”

  Disquieting as this was, I was glad to have my speculations confirmed. Maybe I was starting to think like a spy—not that I expected to have much use for such skills, once Jakub and I resumed our married life in Paris—but at least I’d learned something from this ill-advised escapade. I might not be able to match my husband’s depth as far as his wartime escapades were concerned, but I was beginning to understand the shadowy world he’d frequented. One thing was still bothering me, though. The notebook pages were clearly part of some secret file the ÁVH was keeping on Zoltán. But that was five years ago. How did he get hold of them? I put this question to József.

  “All sorts of nasty secrets have come to light in recent days,” he told us. “Your brother may have ‘liberated’ his file from Communist Party headquarters after the revolutionaries sacked it.”

  “But why did he leave it here for us to find?” asked my brother, picking up the topmost page and scrutinizing the Hungarian words as if by looking hard enough, their secret would be revealed.

  Jakub proposed an answer: “Better the evidence should fall into our hands than someone else’s, although, for the life of me, I don’t know what he expects us to do with it.”

  “Publish it,” said József. “People in the West should know what went on here. That’s what he wants from you.” He shook his head. “It’s all your brother has ever wanted, for as long as I’ve known him. The truth.”

  The cold truth, I thought to myself, tears welling up in my eyes. Everything we’d heard about Zoltán was accurate: his courage, his integrity, the warrior ethic that made him act always for the greater good, for posterity, regardless of his own safety. How he’d managed to survive this long was a miracle; a man with his principles would have fared no better in McCarthy’s America than in Rákosi’s Hungary. And yet his belief in the power of words was so inspiring. Of course we would do what he wanted.

  “Najdroższa, you’re crying.” Jakub was all tender concern, pulling me close and brushing away my tears with the back of his hand.

  “I wish we could have met him,” I sniffed. “And Father too. He ought to know the kind of person his son is.”

  “There is one thing we can do,” said Gray. I watched him remove the envelope containing the visa from an inside pocket of his sports jacket. “We’ll leave this for him right here, in case he returns. I know just the place.”

  First, he folded the notebook pages in half and placed them in his jacket pocket. Then, turning to the section of the Inferno where he’d found the surveillance reports, he slipped the visa between the pages and returned the book to its place on the shelf.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Church bells were ringing as we made our way back to the Škoda. I was expecting the sound to be drowned out by the noise of the excavating equipment the nearer we got to the digging operation, but there was dead silence when we reached the square. Not a soul was moving. The steam shovel operators had emerged from their machines and the diggers had all climbed out of their holes to stand in silence beside their shovels and pickaxes, heads bowed.

  “What’s going on?” said Gray. “Don’t tell me they found the underground prison.”

  József looked at his watch. “They’re observing a moment of silence for the martyrs.”

  It was like Armistice Day. The English marked the end of World War I with a two-minute silence on November 11. The first year that Gray and I were in London, I’d found it unsettling to be out in the streets when everything stopped. The scene before us was eerie in the same way, but the commemoration here was premature. Hungary’s ordeal had not ended; we were just at intermission.

  Out of respect, we waited until the digging resumed before proceeding to the car. With the rattles and clunks of the heavy machinery accompanying us once more, we reached the Škoda only to discover that one of the rear tires was flat.

  Jakub squatted beside the wheel and surveyed the damage. “We seem to have punctured it on something.” He had to shout to be heard over the racket.

  “Or someone punctured it for us,” József yelled back, disinclined, as ever, to believe in accidents. I didn’t think we needed to go beyond the debris in the streets to explain the flat, but I wasn’t abo
ut to bet my life on it. Not after reading the surveillance reports on Zoltán. Anything was possible in this country.

  Gray opened the trunk to check the spare. He had to move the gifts and the extra cans of oil to the back seat in order to get at it, and then he’d spent a few minutes prodding the tire, to assess its condition. The spare was soft, he informed us, most likely due to a slow leak, although given the Romanian playwright’s lackadaisical approach to car maintenance, there was no telling what had caused it or how long it had been that way. He thought we’d be okay driving on an underinflated tire for a short distance, but Austria was out of the question.

  “Can it be repaired?” my husband asked.

  “Plugging the hole in the front tire might be easier,” said Gray. “But that’ll take time, assuming we can even find a garage that’s open.”

  Fortunately, the trunk contained both a wrench and a jack. While Gray and Jakub changed the tire, József and I looked on or, to be more accurate, I looked on while József anxiously scanned the street, hoping to spot any adversaries before they had time to assault us. He was fairly confident we would find a service station along our route. He’d noticed one earlier on an undamaged section of Rákóczi út, one of Budapest’s major arteries.

  “Rákosi, like the dictator?” I said.

  “Certainly not!” This Rákóczi was a national hero, I was informed, an aristocrat who led an unsuccessful uprising against the Habsburgs. Of all the unsuccessful Hungarian uprisings, Rákóczi’s was second only to 1848. Franz Liszt composed a rhapsody about it.

  Jakub, who was engaged just then in tightening the lug nuts on the wheel, paused in his labors. “The Rákóczi March.” He proceeded to hum the opening bars, which I recognized from music appreciation class at the Wentworth Academy. The piece had been arranged for violin, he informed us, and he had performed it as one of his audition pieces for music school.